The Powerful Imagery of Blood

Throughout the Bible there is
a recurring image that is mysterious to modern, Western Christians - that
of blood. We like abstract concepts like atonement and salvation,
but if we really want to understand these ideas as the Bible explains
them, we need to understand its cultural language which includes the imagery
of blood.

The ancient Hebrews thought in concrete ways, expressing abstract ideas
in terms of things they could see, touch and smell. In Hebrew, a person
is not stubborn, he is "stiff-necked"; God is not slow to anger,
he has "long nostrils"; God is not jealous, he is "red-faced".
When God was speaking to them about blood, he spoke to them in this image-based
language. Rather than being woodenly literal about what God said about
blood, our best way to understand it is to imagine how they saw it, and
then translate it into our own language.

Life is in the Blood

The ancient Hebrews believed that the blood
of a creature contained its life. They could observe that a person or
animal bleeding from a wound will grow faint, and with enough blood loss,
will die. Because no other damage had to be done than to let the blood
run out, it was logical to observers that the life of the animal or person
was going out with the blood.(1) This is has been a common understanding
throughout the history of the world, and the sacred awe associated with
blood is still held by traditional African cultures even now.(2) The Bible
reinforces that belief by saying:

For the life of the flesh is in the blood...
For as for the life of all flesh, its blood is identified with its life.
Lev. 17:11, 14

Because of this belief, it was understood
that imbibing the blood of a powerful animal would allow a person to acquire
its "life", to take on some of its power. This is still practiced
in animistic cultures today. The Bible is unique among documents of its
time for forbidding the consuming of blood. Although they could kill and
eat animals, God Himself owned the "life" of the creature, and
the blood had to be given back to him by being poured on an altar, or
on the ground.(3) We read this as an outmoded regulation from ancient
times. But we should look at it as if God was speaking their language
in order to teach them a profound idea -- that God alone is the creator
and possessor of the life of every creature. he says:

But you must not eat meat that has its
lifeblood still in it. And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an
accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from
each man, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of his fellow
man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed;
for in the image of God has God made man. (Gen 9:4-6)

This helps us to understand the odd regulation
about not eating the meat of strangled animals in Acts 15:20. The early
church had made a decision that the Gentiles entering the church did not
need to take on the full requirements of Torah observance, but they needed
to observe the basic laws that God had given even the Gentiles. They noted
that the prohibition of eating animals with the blood still in them came
from Genesis, not from the laws of Moses that were given specifically
to the Israelites. They wanted them to abandon this practice used in idolatrous
ceremonies to show that they had abandoned idol worship, and out of respect
for God's ownership of every life.

The Preciousness of Human Life

An important moral law that God was teaching
through the prohibition of bloodshed in Genesis 9:6 is that human lives
are precious to God - that he made us in His image, so by taking a human
life, we are destroying the one thing in creation that uniquely bears
God's likeness. The sanctity of life may seem second nature to us, but
the idea was unprecedented in ancient, pagan cultures (4). We don't often
contemplate how this singular idea has transformed our entire civilization
to the point that it is what makes us "civilized". Hospitals,
orphanages, and charities of all types have arisen our of the belief that
human life must be preserved at any cost.

Jews have a profound way of expressing this
idea that comes from the first case of shedding of innocent blood, Cain's
murder of Abel. God says to Cain,

"The voice of your brother's blood
(bloods, literally) is crying to Me from the ground." (Gen. 4:10)

The Hebrew word for blood is dam, and the
plural is damim. When the Bible talks about murder, or "bloodguilt",
it usually uses the plural form, damim. Using the logic that the
blood contains the life of a person, to speak of blood in the plural implies
that a murder doesn't just take the life of one person, it takes the lives
of many. Jews therefore have a tradition that the voice of the "bloods"
crying out from the ground was actually the voices of all of the future
descendants of Abel that would have ever lived. From this they have a
saying, "To take the life of one person is like taking the life of
a whole world, and to save the life of one person is like saving a whole
world!" (5)

Innocent Blood

Related to this understanding that the blood
contained the life of a person was the idea that the blood of an innocent
victim of murder would curse the ground. (Of course, blood didn't literally
have to be shed - the phrase "to shed innocent blood" meant
the murder of innocent people, in whatever manner.) In many cultures in
Africa today, the land must be abandoned, and never farmed again until
atonement is made for the bloodshed. (6) The ancient person would understand
that this was why Cain could never farm again - because the land was cursed
by his murder. They would also see it as the reason for the flood - to
both destroy the wicked people of the earth, and purify the earth itself
from the blood that had been shed.

The "shedding of innocent blood" was such a great crime that the only way to get rid of it was to take
the life of the murderer. If the murder was unknown, an animal had to
be sacrificed to atone for the murder. Otherwise, if not atoned for, it
eventually would bring terrible judgment. The sin that finally caused
God to let kingdom of Judah be destroyed was the shedding of innocent
blood. This referred to the murder of the prophets and faithful Jews,
and the abhorrent practice of infant sacrifice:

The LORD sent Babylonian, Aramean, Moabite
and Ammonite raiders to destroy Judah... Surely these things happened
to Judah according to the LORD's command, in order to remove them from
his presence because of the sins of Manasseh and all he had done, including
the shedding of innocent blood. For he had filled Jerusalem with innocent
blood, and the LORD was not willing to forgive. (II Kings 24:2-4, edited)

Jesus also said that this was would bring
judgment on His generation as well, when Jerusalem would be besieged and
the temple burned. He said that God would punish the corrupt temple leaders
because of the righteous blood that they shed:

And so upon you will come all the righteous
blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel
to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between
the temple and the altar. (Matt 23:35)

Covenants Sealed with Blood

Another place blood is always seen is in the formation of covenants. In
Genesis 16, when God makes a covenant with Abraham to give him the land,
he tells him to sacrifice five animals and make a blood path, an ancient
method of covenant-making. Later, God asks Abraham to take on the covenant
of circumcision, where his own blood is shed, as is that of all his male
descendants (Genesis 17:10). Later still, when God makes the covenant
with Moses and the Israelites at Mt. Sinai, they are sprinkled with blood
to seal the covenant (Ex. 24:8). In other ancient cultures, two men making
a covenant would cut their arms and mingle the blood, saying by that act
that they were now bound to each other by the covenant, as their lives
were intertwined by their blood. A covenant was a way to form a new peaceful
relationship between two parties, and the blood of the covenant signified
that their very lives were devoted to it. (7)

Blood Used for Atonement

In the Levitical laws, God explains that he will allow His people to atone
for their sins through the blood of animals. It is a substitution of their
blood for that of the guilty person, the animal's life for the person's
life. Leviticus 17 explains that because the blood represents the life
of the animal, that the blood makes atonement for the life of the person:

For the life of the flesh is in the
blood, and I have assigned it to you for making atonement for your lives
upon the altar; it is the blood, as life, that effects atonement. (Lev.
17:11)

Once again God is using a cultural language
that they would understand - by allowing them to use animal blood for
atonement, he is beginning to teach them that although sin demands punishment,
he will provide a way for them to find forgiveness for their sins by means
of a substitution. he is pointing ahead to the ultimate substitutionary
death of Christ.

The Blood of Christ

Now we can see some of the logic behind Jesus' words at the Last Supper,
when he brings new significance to the third cup of the Passover meal,
the Cup of Redemption:

Then he took the cup, gave thanks and
offered it to them, saying, "Drink from it, all of you.This is
my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness
of sins. (Matt. 26:27-28)

Here we see Jesus using the image of blood
in two ways: he is explaining that the shedding of His blood on the cross
is the substitution of His life for ours, granting us eternal redemption
from our sins. He is also saying that His blood ratifies a new covenant
between God and man, whereby we now have a new relationship with God if
we personally partake of Christ's atonement. The blood of Christ is both
an atonement for sin and the seal of a new covenant, and every time we
take communion, we remind ourselves of our forgiveness, and our new loving
fellowship with God because of the covenant sealed by the blood of Christ.

(1) Article, "Blood", International
Standard Bible Encyclopedia, available online at www.studylight.org,
at this link.

(2) Milly Erema, "Teaching the Bible Using Ugandan Cultural Resources
with Specific Reference to the Old Testament", Western Theological
Seminary Master's Thesis, 2001.

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